Word: manns
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...America, established at Princeton University as lecturer in the humanities, Mann carried on the fight against "Europe's Dark Age." He wrote polemic pamphlets, lectured with a certain dry sententiousness, and broadcast to Germany. His books were translated and were bestsellers. It did not seem to matter that his writing was loaded with obscure symbolism and mythological references, was ironic in outlook, discursive in method and difficult to translate; Mann stood for European culture at its best. In 1941 the family (six grown-up children) moved to Pacific Palisades, Calif., where Mann completed a four-volume work called Joseph...
When Thomas Mann came to America in 1938, he said simply: "Wherever I am is German culture." To Germans rallying against Hitler, or, like himself, driven into exile, the declaration was a defiant battle cry; to non-Germans it was something of a portent. "The plot of every one of his novels," said a critic, "concerns an organism whose vitality is threatened; one can never be sure whether the crisis will end ineluctably in death or whether it is not instead the critical point in a rebirth." Because the vitality of that old organism Europe appeared to be ebbing towards...
...Mann himself was a product of the old European order and tradition. He had been born to a life of large and splendid ease in the Hanseatic city of Lübeck, one of the historic free cities of North Germany. When he was born, Wilhelm I was Kaiser, Bismarck was Chancellor; his father, a prosperous merchant, had been Senator and twice Mayor of Lübeck. His mother was the daughter of a German planter in South America who married a Portuguese Creole. Mann studied literature in Munich, journeyed to Rome, and at 25 had a stupendous success with...
...University, and it was out of his wife's experience in a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients that he built another great success, The Magic Mountain, this time a parable of civilization in decay. The Magic Mountain outsold Hitler's Mein Kampf, but Hitler's quarrel with Mann was based on Mann's nonliterary championing of the old German tradition. One day in 1933, when Mann and his wife were vacationing in Switzerland, Klaus and Erika, their two eldest children, telephoned. "Stay in Switzerland," they advised. "Bad weather is coming." When Mann did not understand, they added...
...Native's Return. In 1944 Mann became a U.S. citizen, but with the passing of the New Deal, he found a growing dissatisfaction with America. He made a trip to postwar Germany and was repelled by Germany's indifference to her recent crimes. But later, 15 years after taking refuge in America, he went back to Europe to live there permanently. "My feeling of being a European became so strong that I had to come back," he said...